Sunday, 29 July 2012

[ In a recent issue of the LSHG Newsletter # 45 (Summer 2012), Ian Birchall wrote a brief review of Revolutionary Communist at Work: A Political Biography of Bert Ramelson by Roger Seifert & Tom Sibley entitled Out of Time. Tom Sibley has now written a brief response to Birchall for this blog - which we publish below - and he will write a longer piece in response for a future issue of the LSHG Newsletter. Ian Birchall has said that he will respond to that longer response when it appears...]

Response to Birchall on Ramelson by Tom Sibley

Ian Birchall's sour and sometimes snide review (London
Socialist Historian's Group Newsletter, 2012) fails to engage with the book’s
central arguments dealing inter alia with revolutionary strategy, the relevance
of Leninism to British conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, the role of the rank
and file in this period and so many other questions which Ramelson addressed,
analysed and offered leadership on.

Birchall implies that we deliberately mislead readers about
the content of Ramelson’s report on the 1958 Labour Party Conference, (World
News, October 1958) in order to, in his words, “gloss over the fact that the
Campaign for Nuclear disarmament was opposed by the Communist Party for the
first two years of its existence”.This
alleged fact is a fabrication and a total misrepresentation of the Communist
Party’s position.If Birchall had
bothered to look at CP documents and reports in the two years referred to,
including extensive coverage in the Daily Worker, he would have seen that the Party
gave full support to the activities of CND from its formation in early 1958 (See
World News, March 1958 pp163-5).This is
confirmed in the official history of CND (CND - The Story of a Peace Movement
by Kate Hudson).To quote the relevant
passage “An important mobilising group for the march was the
communist-influenced British Peace Committee, which continued with a high level
of activity during these years.In early
1958 it passed a resolution welcoming the formation of CND and urged its local
groups to give support to the new organisation.According to John Cox, Chairman of CND from 1971-1977, this backing was
one of the reasons that the turnout for the initial CND demonstrations was so
much higher than organisers expected.” (pp 56-7)

Birchall accuses us of deliberately misunderstanding the
World News article referred to above. But what we wanted to stress from the
article was Ramelson’s analysis of the weaknesses of the Parliamentary left,
particularly on economic strategy, and the failure of the trade union left to
address the need to confront Capitalism. It was necessary, argued Ramelson, to
target the trade unions and win them for a Socialist approach.It remains our view that this was the most
important section of the article particularly since, as the book shows,
Ramelson’s main work in the peace movement was in 1950’s Yorkshire where he did
so much work with the miners in developing pit-based peace organisations (See
Revolutionary Communist at Work pp53-7). We could, and perhaps should, have
dealt with the Party’s peace work in greater detail. If we had we would have
had no difficulty in showing what an important part the Party played in helping
to build and sustain the peace movement over many years.This is contra to Birchall’s snide
conclusions which, without evidence and relying on misrepresentation, attempt
to deny the Party’s leading contribution to a broad range of progressive
movements and campaigns.

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

[[The LSHG was very sorry to read of the recent passing of the Scottish socialist historian James D Young (1931-2012), who led a remarkable life of political activism and wrote on an extraordinary range of topics including a 'biographical history' of international socialism, Scottish labour history, Robert Burns, C.L.R. James, as well as an autobiography, Making Trouble. Our sincere condolences go out to his family, friends and comrades. There is a tribute from his son here, but by way of paying our respects we will republish a review of Young's THE VERY BASTARDS OF CREATION: SCOTTISH INTERNATIONAL RADICALISM, 1707-1995: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY by his friend (and another late great socialist historian) Ray Challinor, from New Politics (1997)]].

The Uniqueness of Scottish Dissent

THE VERY BASTARDS OF CREATION: SCOTTISH INTERNATIONAL RADICALISM, 1707-1995: A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

LET ME START WITH A CONFESSION. Though I live close to the England/Scotland border, sometimes I find it extremely difficult to fathom what a Scot with a broad accent is saying. But the differences do not end there. We live in a period of growing divergence, an accentuation of a distinctly Scottish culture and politics.

How and when did this process begin? In 1707 the two countries officially combined. Yet, the ordinary Scot can see that few if any benefits came from the Act of Union. There was the savagery of the Highland clearances. Vast tracts of land were depopulated, crofters made to flee or were burnt alive in their cottages, just to make them the playgrounds of the aristocracy. Then the Irish troubles spilled over into Scotland: the potato famine, rack-renting and oppression of the native population led to a mass exodus from Erin.

Angry Irish immigrants and dispossessed Highlanders mingled in Central Scotland, where the tensions were heightened by the Industrial Revolution and the fact that pay and conditions were worse than in the rest of the United Kingdom. No wonder, to quote the title of James D. Young's book, in London's high society, they were regarded as "the very bastards of Creation."

BUT THIS HOSTILITY TO THE REBELLIOUS SCOTS sometimes extended to relatively progressive counterparts. Indeed, the expression "the very bastards of Creation" was coined by John Wilkes, a pioneer in the struggle against the English state's despotic power. Still Wilkes identified himself with the English Establishment he loathed, unwilling to struggle for those of the border to enjoy the same human rights as himself.

Edward Thompson acknowledges implicitly even in the title of his classic work, The Making of the English Working Class, that the Scots are a separate race with a different outlook and development. While James D. Young's book does not attempt to cover the same vast terrain as Thompson, it nevertheless provides some new, valuable insights. He selects a clutch of radicals from the 18th Century down to contemporary times, using them to illustrate the uniqueness of Scottish dissent.

His impressive portrait gallery includes J.T. Callender, Alexander Rodger, Alexander Robertson and John Murdoch, as well as people like Keir Hardie and John Maclean, much better known to contemporary socialists. Combined, this collection of talent and anger explain how the author can argue that Scotland, quite perversely in a British context, has bucked the trend. While other parts of the United Kingdom have meekly submitted to the Thatcherite counterrevolution, north of the border a Celtic kick back has taken place.

Now suffering from a serious illness, James D. Young could be forgiven if he spent the rest of his life in pleasurable relaxation. But he is made of sterner stuff: a socialist in the same mold as Hal Draper, a believer in socialism-from-below, he feels his duty is to recount the past struggles of working people to create a new society. Though it is unclear how long he will be able to continue, one thing is certain -- James D. Young will die with a pen in one hand, his other raised in a clenched-fist salute.

Congress House is a fully accessible building.
There is no charge for attending this event.

You must register by
contacting sertucevents@tuc.org.uk, calling 020 7467 1220 or
by post to SERTUC, Congress House, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS

Name

Union, trades council, campaign organisation

Email

Telephone

Address

Woody
Guthrie is best known as a political singer-songwriter and folk musician, whose musical and
political legacies are enormous and inseparable. Guthrie travelled with migrant
workers from Oklahoma to California and learned traditional folk and blues
songs. Many of his songs are about his experiences in the Dust Bowl era during the Great Depression, and the hardship
suffered by working people. Throughout his life Guthrie was associated with communist groups, though he
was seemingly not a member of any. He was an active supporter of trade unionism
and a trade union organiser.

Will
Kaufman is a singer and multi-instrumentalist and has performed his tribute to
Woody Guthrie at countless trades clubs, folk clubs, union halls and
universities in Europe and the USA. His WOODY GUTHRIE: HARD TIMES AND HARD
TRAVELIN' is a captivating “live documentary” that sets the songs of Woody
Guthrie in the context of the American 1930s.

Dr Kaufman is Professor of American
Literature and Culture at the University of Central Lancashire, England. He has
given his Woody Guthrie presentations at such major events as the Glastonbury
Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, the Chester Literature
Festival, the Big Session, the Whitby Folk Festival, the Piacenza Literature
and Blues Festival in Italy and, this year, at the TUC’s Tolpuddle festival.

Will
is the author of the acclaimed Woody
Guthrie, American Radical, published by the University of
Illinois Press, in 2011.

www.willkaufman.com

Copies are available from
Bookmarks, which will have a stall at the event.

Tuesday, 10 July 2012

The records of the Labour Research
Department [LRD] are deposited in
the TUC Library Collections, held in London Metropolitan University. The
origins of the LRD lay in the Committee of Inquiry into the Control of
Industry, set up by the Fabian Society in 1912 (during a period of mass strikes
and great social unrest) to produce an alternative plan for the future
organisation of industry. In 1913, the Committee became the Fabian Research
Department, producing research reports and other publications, but also
organising lectures and conferences. George Bernard Shaw became the
Chairman and both Sidney and Beatrice Webb played leading roles.A generation of young intellectuals, who went
on to play key roles in the labour and broader political movements, were
recruited to the project via the University
Socialist Federation [records also held here] and it was seen as a
power-house for new political ideas. Prominent names in the records include J.J.
Mallon [secretary of the Anti-Sweating League], J.S. Middleton
[Labour Party General Secretary], Maud Pember Reeves [feminist and
socialist], W.Mellor [journalist], Dr Ethel Bentham MP
[suffragist], Susan Lawrence MP, Clifford Allen [founder of the
No Conscription Fellowship], Ellen Wilkinson MP, Maurice Reckitt
[writer and Christian sociologist], G.D.H. Cole [writer and journalist]
and Robin Page Arnot [historian and secretary of the LRD].In 1918, the name changed to the LRD and it
prioritised supplying unions and other groups with information to use in
negotiations, political debates and public meetings. The Archive provides a
detailed record of trade union and political struggles in the 20th
century. The catalogue of the Archive
may be seen online at www.londonmet.ac.uk/tuc

If you would like
to visit the LRD Archive in the TUC Library Collections, please
phone or email to arrange a visit Monday-Friday 9.15-16.45.

European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence, 1954-1962
by Ian Birchall

July 5 2012 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence. National liberation was achieved after an exceptionally bitter war lasting seven-and-a-half years, though it was not recognised as a war by the French authorities, who treated Algerian combatants as criminals rather than as prisoners of war.

To commemorate the anniversary the journal Revolutionary History has produced an issue devoted to some of the activities of the brave individuals, in France and elsewhere in Europe, who gave practical support to the Algerian National Liberation Front [FLN].
Some of their story has already been told, in Martin Evans’ excellent oral history The Memory of Resistance [Berg, 1997], and in French in Hervé Hamon & Patrick Rotman, Les porteurs de valises : la résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie [Albin Michel, 1979]. But while the support networks organised by Francis Jeanson [a philosopher closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre] and Henri Curiel [an Egyptian Communist] are quite well-known, much less has been written about the revolutionary socialists and anarchists who backed the FLN from the very beginning. But as Mohammed Harbi – a highly respected historian and a leading FLN organiser in the early years of the war – has written that at the outset, “On the far left only the libertarians and the Trotskyists recognised the events of 1 November as the start of a war and showed themselves to be ready to respond to it in the name of the principles of universal socialism, in the name of internationalism.”

The role of the mainstream left was quite deplorable.
It was while Guy Mollet, leader of the Socialist Party, was prime minister that the war was escalated and the number of French troops in Algeria rose to 450,000. The Communist Party, anxious to achieve a “Popular Front” alliance with the Socialist Party, caused consternation to many of its members by voting in favour of “special powers”, which gave the Minister-Resident in Algeria the right to rule by decree, and transferred police powers to the army, giving it the authority to detain and interrogate suspects. The Minister of “Justice”, François Mitterrand, took a hard line on authorising the execution of Algerian prisoners.

The total forces of the French Trotskyists and anarchists in 1954 amounted to only a few hundred. But they were dedicated individuals, and a number of the Trotskyists had experience of underground work during the German Occupation. So the FLN turned towards them for practical assistance.
Those who gave practical support to the FLN were often known as “suitcase carriers”. The racism of the French police was aggravated by the war, and anyone of North African appearance was liable to be constantly stopped and searched. So people of impeccably “French” appearance transported documents and publications for them. And above all the FLN depended on money collected from Algerian workers in France, of whom there were over a quarter of a million. Again this money was transported by “suitcase carriers”. The French Trotskyists also set up a printshop for FLN publications and helped to provide forged identity papers.
Later some [including the young Alain Krivine] were involved in organising jail-breaks for Algerian prisoners. The Trotskyist leader Michel Pablo helped to set up an arms factory in Morocco to manufacture weapons the FLN could not obtain elsewhere. Skilled workers were recruited from France and various other countries including Britain. Pablo himself was later jailed in the Netherlands for attempting to forge French currency for the FLN.

Despite the courage and determination of the FLN’s fighters, the FLN did not win a military victory. France finally withdrew from Algeria because the war was increasingly unacceptable to the French population. Although those actively supporting the FLN were few in number, their role in shifting the public mood was not insignificant, and they paved the way for the broader expressions of opposition towards the end of the war. And many of those radicalised by the experiences of the war played a leading role in the events of May-June 1968.

The new issue of Revolutionary History contains an English translations of several chapters from Sylvain Pattieu’s book Les Camarades des frères [The Comrades of the Brothers], which gives the first full account of the activities of the French Trotskyists and anarchists. This is based on extensive archival research and on interviews with many of the major activists.
This is supplemented by a number of other documents from the period:

A remarkable interview with Henri and Clara Benoîts, who worked at the huge Renault Billancourt car factory throughout the war, and who describe how they cooperated with FLN activists and defended them against state persecution.

Letters from conscripts and reservists who tried to resist being sent to Algeria in 1955 and 1956.

Articles from Voix ouvrière [precursor of Lutte ouvrière] and the so-called Lambertist tendency, which supported the FLN’s rival, the Mouvement National Algérien [MNA], but which ran an effective campaign in defence of veteran Algerian leader Messali Hadj.

An account of the Socialisme ou barbarie group, whose leading writer Jean-François Lyotard [later a well-known post-modernist philosopher] wrote some penetrating critiques of the bureaucratic nature of the FLN – but also carried suitcases for the Curiel network.

There is also material about activity elsewhere in Europe. Austrian historian Fritz Keller has contributed a fascinating piece about Austrian activists who helped to organise desertions from the Foreign Legion. They were backed up by female young socialists who used a popular magazine to become pen friends of legionnaires. And John Plant writes about the Labour MP John Baird, a clandestine Trotskyist, who organised a publication and fund raising, and who got support from Tony Benn and Michael Foot.

Tuesday, 3 July 2012

[The publication of the full complete translation of Victor Serge's classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary is an event of historic importance in its own right - and as Nicolas Lezard noted in his review in the Guardian, 'anyone who cares about justice and freedom of speech should have a copy'. Georges Paizis (one of the translators of Serge's memoir along with the late Peter Sedgwick), is speaking at the book launch of Memoirs of a Revolutionary at Marxism 2012 this weekend, but Richard Greeman - Victor Serge's Literary Executor - has recently written the following essay entitled 'Victor Serge’s Political Testament', that the LSHG is proud to publish below]

“What would be Victor Serge’s political position if he were alive today?” During the sixty-odd years since Serge’s untimely death, this question—a priori unanswerable—has been asked (and answered) many times — on occasion, as we shall see, by self-interested politicos and pundits. The consensus among these postmortem prophets is that this hypothetical posthumous Serge would have moved to the right, along with ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler and the so-called ‘New York intellectuals’ around the Partisan Review. It is of course impossible to prove otherwise. Yet, but the fact remains that throughout the Cold War neither the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom nor any other conservative anti-Communist group ever attempted to exploit Serge’s writings, which continued to speak far too revolutionary a language and remained largely out of print. Nonetheless, the specter of an undead right-wing Serge continues to haunt the critics, and there are reasons why.

Ironically, the first accusation of ‘abandoning Marxism’ came from Leon Trotsky, whose ideas Serge had defended at great risk in the USSR and continued to propagate in exile as Trotsky’s translator and through his own books. As the reader of the Memoirs is aware, in the late 30s Serge and Trotsky had political differences over Kronstadt, the Cheka, and the POUM, and in 1938 Trotsky unjustly (on the basis of an article he hadn’t read[1]) portrayed Serge as abandoning Marxism along with Stalinism and drifting to the Right.[2] Ignoring these attacks, Serge continued loyally to defend Trotsky to his death, helped expose Trotsky’s murderer, and collaborated with Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, on The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky. Yet generations of Trotskyists have reflexively handed down Trotsky’s caricature of Serge as a “bridge from revolution to reaction”— an accusation apparently confirmed by the myth of Serge's deathbed conversion to Gaullism.[3]

In January 1948, a few weeks after Serge’s death, that great confabulator André Malraux launched a macabre press campaign claiming Serge as a deathbed convert to Gaullism. The sad fact is that six days before he died, Serge had sent a grossly flattering personal letter to Malraux, begging the support of de Gaulle’s once and future Minister of Culture (and influential Gallimard editor) to publish his novel Les Derniers temps in France.[4] Desperate to leave the political isolation and the (fatally) unhealthy altitude of Mexico for Paris, Serge indulged in an uncharacteristic ruse de guerre, feigning sympathy for Malraux’s “political position” —(according to his son Vladimiry, at the latter’s urging). Serge’s ruse backfired. His letter and the news of his death reached Paris simultaneously, and Malraux seized the moment by printing selected excerpts — and leaking them to C. L. Sulzberger, who published them in The New York Times—thus recruiting Serge’s fresh corpse into the ranks of the Western anti-Communist crusade.[5]

Aside from this private letter, there is zero evidence in Serge’s political writings, published and unpublished,[6] of sympathy for Gaullism or Western anti-Communism—quite the contrary. In 1946, Serge sharply criticized his comrade René Lefeuvre, editor of the far-left review Masses, for publishing an attack on the USSR by an American anti-Communist: “If the Soviet regime is to be criticized,” wrote Serge, “let it be from a socialist and working-class point of view. If we must let American voices be heard, let them be those of sincere democrats and friends of peace, and not chauvinistic demagogues; let them be those of the workers who will succeed one day, we hope, in organizing themselves into an independent party.” A few months later, Serge followed up: “I understand that the Stalinist danger alarms you. But it must not make us lose sight of our overall view. We must not play into the hands of an anti-Communist bloc [.…] We shall get nowhere if we seem more preoccupied with criticising Stalinism than with defending the working class. The reactionary danger is still there, and in practice we shall often have to act alongside the Communists.”[7]

More recently Serge’s projected posthumous rightward drift has been alleged on the basis of his guilt by association with erstwhile U.S. leftists and socialists who indeed subsequently moved right. This argument also ignores the fact Serge’s main political associations were in Europe. In any case, we must remember that in Mexico Serge lived by his pen (like Marx in exile who wrote for Horace Greeley’s New York Herald Tribune), writing news articles in English for the social democratic press (the staunchly anti-Communist Call and New Leader) as well as think pieces for Partisan Review (whose editors had supported his struggles to survive in Vichy France and Mexico). Many of these New York intellectuals did indeed move to the right, beginning with James Burnham in the 1940s. Thus Serge, it is argued, “would have” moved right too. Yet not long before he died, Serge vigorously attacked Burnham, writing:

"The paradox that he has developed, doubtless out of love for a provocative theory, is as false as it is dangerous. Under a thousand insipid forms it is to be found in the Press and the literature of this age of preparation for the Third World War. The reactionaries have an obvious interest in confounding Stalinist totalitarianism—exterminator of the Bolsheviks—with Bolshevism itself; their aim is to strike at the working class, at Socialism, at Marxism, even at Liberalism…"

All this would be just a sad footnote were it not for that the posthumous image, based on the old Gaullism and ‘New York intellectual’ism arguments, of a right-wing Serge that was still being agitated as late as 2010.[8] To lay this ghost to rest once and for all, let us quote Serge’s last significant political statement, generally considered his “political testament.”

“Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution” was dated August 1947 and published in Paris by La Révolution proletarianne in November 1947, the month of his death. There Serge writes:

"A feeble logic—pointing an accusing finger at the dark spectacle of the Stalinist Soviet Union—deduces from this the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, hence that of Marxism, hence that of Socialism […] Aren’t you forgetting the other bankruptcies? Where was Christianity during the recent social catastrophes? What happened to Liberalism? What did Conservatism—enlightened or reactionary—produce? Did it not give us Mussolini, Hitler, Salazar, and Franco? If it was a question of honestly weighing the many failures of different ideologies, we would have our work cut out for us for a long time. And it is far from over…"

As far as capitalism is concerned, Serge concluded:

"There is no longer any doubt that the era of stable, growing, relatively pacific capitalism came to an end with the First World War. The Marxist revolutionaries who announced the opening of a global revolutionary era—and said that if socialism did not establish itself in at least the great European powers, another period of barbarism and a “cycle of wars of war and revolution” (as Lenin put it, quoting Engels) would follow—were right. The conservatives, the evolutionists, and the reformists who chose to believe in the future bourgeois Europe carefully cut into pieces at Versailles, then replastered at Locarno, and fed with phrases dug up at the League of Nations—are today remembered as statesmen of blind policies….

The Marxist revolutionaries of the Bolshevik school awaited and worked toward the social transformation of Europe and the world by an awakening of the working masses and by the rational and equitable reorganization of a new society. They expected to continue working toward the time when men would take control over their own destinies. There they made a mistake—they were beaten. Instead, the transformation of the world is taking place amidst a terrible confusion of institutions, movements, and beliefs without the hoped-for clarity of vision, without a sense of renewed humanism, and in a way that now imperils all the values and hopes of men. Nevertheless the general trends are still those defined by the socialists of 1917–20 toward the collectivization and the planification of economies, the internationalization of the world, the emancipation of oppressed and colonized peoples, and the formation of mass-based democracies of a new kind. The alternative was also foreseen by the socialists: barbarism and war, war and barbarism—a monster with two heads."

As Peter Sedgwick put it in 1963: “Whatever else they may be, these are not the words of a man of the Right, or of any variety of ex-revolutionary penitent.”[9]

Richard Greeman

Notes

1. Victor Serge, “Marxism in Our Time,” Partisan Review 5, 3 (August–September 1938): 26–32. Serge vigorously defends Marxism in this article, and there is reason to believe that the source of Trotsky’s misinformation was the Stalinist double-agent in Paris, Etienne.
2. See Richard Greeman, “Opposition Within the Opposition Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky—Relations 1936–1940,” in Beware of Vegetarian Sharks, Praxis, NY, 2012.

3. Peter Sedgwick analyzed this incident in detail in “Victor Serge and Gaullism,” appended to the original 1963 Oxford edition of Memoirs on which we have in part based our summary.
4. The topic of Serge’s novel occupies two-thirds of the original typescript letter, a photocopy of which was made available to me in 1990 by Florence Malraux, the writer’s daughter.